Friday, February 24, 2012

Moto Sex On The Beach...

At the height of last summer, I found myself inhaling clams on the half-shell, between swigs of Baccardi and Coke, at the bar of the Aztec, which in my opinion is one of the great modern dives of the Jersey Shore. In the early ’60’s, Seaside Heights, NJ, was nothing less than a kind of Riviera for the families of cops and firemen from Jersey City. My folks always rented a little house here for two weeks, about six blocks from the beach. The houses were tight and unair-conditioned, but so was most of Jersey City and this place had the advantage of an ocean and a beach. It also had a boardwalk with rides, which to an eight-year-old was the equivalent of Disneyland or a world’s fair.

But meaning no disrespect to the folks of this community, Seaside Heights has matured into the painted whore of the Jersey Shore. My writing skills put me in a similar editorial category. (Not that you could find whores in Seaside Heights, which I think would be an added attraction.) The Aztec is an open-air bar fronting the amusement pier and squats on the boarded runway, perfect for viewing some of the skimpiest bathing suits to barely cover a squirrel. I had gotten there early in the day, around 11:45am, when it was still possible to find a nearby parking spot for my K75 and a barstool overlooking the action for myself.

More than anything else, I wanted a glass of tomato juice (flavored with horseradish, clam broth, worcestershire sauce, and a strong hint of Moscow), but the famous Jersey Shore heat had already turned the inside of my helmet into an oven, and I demanded a Tom Collins instead. And I wanted a huge shrimp cocktail right alongside it too.

“A pound of peel and eat?” asked the bartender, pouring the gin, and speaking around a toothpick.

Peel and eat shrimp are typically the little runty ones, that while good, are usually hot and not what I had in mind.

“No... I want ten “jumbos” or even “colossals” if you have them,” I said, “in a shrimp cocktail as big as my ass.”

I knew I was pissing in the wind looking for colossal shrimp in a joint like this. I doubted I’d find them anywhere in blue collar Seaside. A colossal shrimp is to what you will find in a chain restaurant or a joint as to what the Hindenburg Zeppelin is to my cigar.

“No colossals,” said the bartender, who was turning out to be the warm conversationalist I’d anticipated.

The Tom Collins was a regulation shot of Gordon’s gin (less a hair at the rim), industrial strength sour mix, and club soda over ice. It was the kind of collins I would have expected in Rahway, the New Jersey State Penitentiary. But mixing a Tom Collins is about art, and there are damn few artists tending bar in Seaside Heights at 11:45am, on a Saturday. Certainly none at the Aztec. This is why I drink simple Baccardi and Coke in the summer... Only a moron can fuck it up, though it is possible. I once had a bartender, who looked like he was 11-years-old, pour me a spiced rum and vanilla Coke. This was like drinking “flit.” And he was pissed when I made him take it back. (Make sure you write in to me if you remember what “flit” was. A free copy of my book to the first reader who mentions it in the comments.)

The shrimp cocktail was perfect. Each jumbo shrimp had been steamed to perfection and iced to the temperature of Hagen Daz. Firm, sweet, and offering but momentary resistance to the teeth, these were the flavor of the shore. And the red cocktail sauce wasn’t bad either. I added a few drops of Tobasco sauce to kick things up.

“Another collins,” asked the bartender. (He may have been training to become a game show host, but was using up his conversational abilities quickly.)

“Baccardi and Coke,” I said. “A double.”

Asking for a double these days can be dicey. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, where Amish separatists are working their way into power, a number of bars will no longer pour a double. But on this day, the Constitution was fully respected in the Aztec.

I was halfway through the shrimp when a young guy, about 23, put his hand on the stool to my left. “Anyone sitting here?” he asked.

“Not until now,” I replied, hiding my disappointment that it would be him.

He smiled and put a helmet that must have cost $980 on the floor. You know the type of helmet: red and black graphics preferred by “Garkull, the Killer Lord of Centuri 9.” His bike was a red and black Killabusa 9400, with a back tire as thick as a tree trunk. His riding gear consisted of a sleeveless tee shirt and baggy shorts, with sandals on his feet. He had the physique of an amateur weight-lifter and the nonchalance of an investment banker. (Of the two bikers, guess which one of us was going to get laid 56 times this weekend?)

He ordered a “Sex On The Beach” and it was all I could do to subdue a smirk. But then I thought, “Why not? I’d order that two if I thought I could get it.”

“What are you drinking?” he asked, pleasantly enough.

“Spiced rum and vanilla Coke.”

“I’ll try that next,” he said with a smile. “That your old BMW parked at the curb outside?”

“Yeah... It is. How could you tell?”

“Well, you’re the only guy at a shore bar wearing yak leather crash boots and Kevlar® branded jeans, with a pair of leather gloves in your belt,” he said.

“You called it,” I said, thinking, “Go fuck yourself, kid.”

“My grandfather had a bike like that,” said the kid.

“Did he ride it to Lincoln’s inauguration?”

The kid recognized a joke (even though it wasn’t on FaceBook) and busted out laughing... “I don’t think they had motorcycles back then.”

“Sure they did,” I said. “That was the year BMW introduced fuel injection as standard equipment. Most of the industry followed in 2008.”

The kid was okay, and went on to tell me he was here to “hook up” a woman he’d met at a party the week before. She’d been with her boyfriend of several years then and needed a few days to throw him from a moving car, or so the kid understood.

I didn’t recall that the mating rituals of my early 20’s were as cut and dried as that, but then again, I was a slow bloomer. In fact, I was like one of those plants that blooms once every ten years, before eating the farmer’s cattle.

The kid was in the process of telling me how he is able to make a perfect “stoppie,” with the back wheel four feet in the air — while texting — when the woman showed up. And in truth, if I was 23, I would have thrown her asshole boyfriend out of the car myself. She was a redheaded pheromone whose very shape was defined by a tan. With a smile crafted by a graphic dental artist and eyes that tied a knot in my DNA, she introduced herself as “Dina.” I grinned in acknowledgement as I couldn’t make my mouth utter a sound. He finished the drink, and the two of then went down to the “Killabusa.” Her riding gear appeared to be sunscreen #23 and a bra from Victoria’s Secret. She wrapped around him like an ad for foreplay and the two of them roared off.

There is nothing like seeing how an expert does something to show you how you are not doing it. And yet the kid’s technique lacked something in the way of elegance... Missing was a hint of poetry... Gone was the Bogie and Bacall back and fourth that requires a man to shift gears while sitting at the bar too. Naturally, I’d have liked to have had the benefit of the kid’s perspective, but on my terms... In my words.

Above: Silver screen legend Lauren Bacall. Photo from Wikipedia.

Above: Humphrey Bogart knew how to communicate with women.Photo From Wikipedia.

This whole incident caused me to look back with a sad kind of introspective.

I have very few regrets in my life, but one of them is never really experiencing sex on the beach... Nor on the dunes... And not under the boardwalk. (I also regret not writing for television and the screen at age 25, and I regret not locking my first mother-in-law in a closet with a hive of killer bees.) I have had some really good times at the shore, but never the fantasy I had in mind. Still, I was a kid with a motorcycle once, and had the kind of times that so many people fantasize about. The K75 didn’t look like the type of bike that would get me laid in Seaside Heights. Maybe in Maine, though.

There is nothing like the sensation of the life of a motorcycle, surging into your own, through the handlebars. It is my dream to ride a modified BMW K1200 from Seaside Heights, NJ to Eureka, CA, getting laid on the beaches of both places in the process. (It would be cool if it was with the same woman.) And in making this dream happen, I am going to unleash so many others, with each one attached to a story. I hope that young kid took that woman back to someplace intimate, poured her a spiced rum and vanilla Coke, slipped her panties off — and discovered she was a guy. Every story needs a surprise ending. I wonder what mine will be.

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Sex on the beach is not all it's cracked up to be Jack - 5 years living in the tropical paradise of Lagos in West Africa taught me that.

It's not the sand in the cracks that puts a damper on things, it's the mosquito bites on the Butt. And the sandflies too, they try hard for a place on the inconvenient-placement-of-itchy-bites medal table as well.

Still, when one is young and has drunk a case or two of Star (Nigerian Beer - of a sort) these things seem to take on a romantic and exotic attractionRegards

Doesn't it feel swell to be able to say that "sex on the beach" isn't everything it's cracked up to be?"

I want to be able to say that too.

I once had an incredible beauty on a bear skin rug, in front of a raging fireplace. While cool, it was no better nor worse than other times. But it enabled me to describe the event as "a woman I swept away on a predator I killed."

I rather liked the sound of that.

It is unlikely I'll romance someone into a scenario on the beach at this late stage... But on a balcony overlooking the ocean has potential.

Jack, I could regale you for hours with stories from my time out In Africa.I was a little over 24 when I took a job out there, and still full of piss and vinegar and ideals. What an eye-opener it was! The luxury of paid-for domestic staff and chauffeurs, company beach houses, speedboats and Hobie cats felt so surreal with the contrast of the ‘normal’ poverty out there, but we pretty much had to make our own entertainment.

There were no bars as such, and no Beer on tap anywhere. We used to drink in the local Brothel – they had air-conditioning, a pool table, darts board, fridges full of cold bottled beer, and you were always guaranteed to meet your friends there on a Friday night.

I stayed through 2 coup d’etats, had a friend shot in the seat next to me by a drunk policeman at a roadblock, got locked up for the weekend by the NSO (a sort of Nigerian SS) and stretchered back to Hospital in London for 6 weeks when I got Malaria and Glandular Fever together.

When I make it over to the US again (if they let me in) I’ll look you up for a Beer and bore you with all the details:)Regards

You're on. I'd love to hear your stories, particularly the details of the Nigerian brothel. I can't imagine wandering into a place like that. Nor can I imagine getting shot by a member of the Nigerian SS.

I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have you as a Twisted Roads reader. You're just the sort of authority I'd like to have with me, in the event I ended up in a Nigerian brothel or a roadblock manned by drunken cops.

What kind of bike do you ride and where do you ride it?

Thank you for reading Twisted Roads and for writing in. I'm sure you will greatly add to the educational content of the comments section.

I have a flit gun but it's now used for powdered tomato dust. And the sound of pumping a flit gun spraying for bugs was pretty cool too. But not as much fun as running behind the mosquito fogger down the Shore, inhaling good lungfulls of DDT, flitting from place to place.Never bothered me, Never bothered me, Never bothered...........

And speaking of sex on the beach, do you know why naked women don't drink beer on the beach? Because they might get sand in their Schlitz.

The "flit" gun was a combination of the cylinder that used to keep the screen door from banging, and a tin can with a metal spout on the top. It made a sweet, oily mist of poison that probably spread cancer through the air.

My brother, a former Harley rider, has had sex in desert (a la Nevada), which he described as a highly over-rated experience.

I never knew a woman who drank Schlitz... We moved in different social circles.

I have had sex in a foundry, and can tell you there is nothing quite like it. At one point, my partner (a pole dancer from a joint south of Bethlehem, Pa) swore she could feel the floor move. It did, as a freshly poured locomotive fell off the storage room shelf.

I am not a bad influence on Steve Williams. In fact, I cam assure you it is quite the other way around. I never chased pole dancers until I started reading his blog. The first time I met Steve in Bloomsburg, Pa, he was doing a wheelie in the Dairy Queen parking lot, wearing lacy panties as a blindfold. Now you wouldn't think that lace panties would make much of a blindfold, but the pole dancer was still wearing them.

The last line of your post had be laughing. Yeah, those types of times are not in my historical makeup. But I do love the interactions between Bogi and Bacall. I'm just a little more of a smartass than that. ;)

Interesting that you referenced Bacall.About 12-15(?) years ago My wife and I had tickets to a speaking engagement of hers, and a social gathering after. Upon hearing that I would be attending, my father allowed as how he (and countless others in his generation) had been smitten by her. I gladly gave up my ticket and my father has a framed picture of him and Ms. Bacall in a place of honor in his den. Your mention of her made me smile - thanks!

Nice easy reading today (or last week. I've never been very timely.) I felt welcomed along, asked to bask in a warm dose of sun, Jersey, and mix of memory and bullshit. Perfect. I liked it, but then again, I like nostalgia. I get nostalgic for things I never even saw.

I try to keep things on the "easy read" level, but I am occasionally forced to go for the cheap shot. And I consider it a successful day when I can make a sophisticated reader like yourself yearn for something that predates their past.

This is the first in a series of short stories. I prefer short story erotica like these and its one the few I've found that has some adventure. I read all three in the series. Good writing and decent plot in all three.

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About Me

BMW Rider, humor writer, and and a public relations specialist to the business travel sector, I have made a career out of telling it like I see it for the past 30 years! A member of the mileage-crazed Pennsytlvania-based Mac-Pac, my motorcycle stories have been published in various venues, and in the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America's monthly publication — the Owners News. I am also the author of "Politically Correct Cigar Smoking For Social Terrorists," a book on men's sensitivity.